Elemental Force

I happen to have discovered a direct relation between magnetism and light, also electricity and light, and the field it opens is so large and I think rich.

—Letter to Christian Schönbein (November 13, 1845), The Letters of Faraday and Schönbein, 1836–1862

Michael Faraday’s note to his friend Schönbein describing what he was learning about magnetism, electricity, and light was understated, considering that he had just helped crack open the door of what would become modern hard science. James Clark Maxwell’s book about the interconnectivity of light, electricity, and magnetism, published twenty years later, had an influence as profound as Newton’s Laws. In providing the “second great unification in physics,” Faraday and Maxwell ushered in twentieth-century science to a degree that Einstein said, “I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.”

Elemental forces are as present in the arts as in the sciences. Attraction and repulsion, positive and negative, illumination and darkness, disruption and symmetry are pervasive in both the methods and substance of art. Like alternating current and atomic structure, literature offers protagonists and antagonists, stasis and movement, magnetic and repellent characters, light and dark tones, every emotion and its opposite.

In this issue’s story “Neighbor Angel,” Nathan Greenberg writes a realistic parable about how charismatic art and fertility may emerge from what seem like their opposites: chaos and loathing. The narrator and his Korean wife live in Seoul, making their way as young professionals as they try for a first child. The wife, Eunji, works stubbornly but with little inspiration to make a name for herself as an artist. When construction begins on a fantastically tall high-rise right across from their modest apartment, they are at first repelled and paralyzed, unable to accomplish anything due to the noise and disruption. Eunji miscarries; yet somehow, in an unexplainable, almost magic moment, her repulsion turns to fascination and inspiration, and the high-rise tower becomes a beneficent presence that blesses the couple with more than one surprise.

Daniel Hornsby’s “Purple Knot” is a comedy with a twist about a teenager and his single mother who fall under the influence of a Southern birding guru. When the guru gathers a group of paying disciples around him in a Florida condo to commune and search for a supposedly rare and elusive bird species, the teenage narrator receives an object lesson in how susceptible even adults, especially lonely ones, can be to the magnetic pull of a con artist. Diana Xin’s story “Joy Comes in the Morning” is another story about seemingly failed relationships that end up carrying meaning and significance. Laura is an aspiring artist who has returned to her Midwestern mill-town home to help care for her dying mother. She is invited into a women’s prayer group, but there’s a complication: the group’s kind leader is the wife of an old boyfriend. Both Laura and Pete, the boyfriend, recognize that resuming their tangled past affair would be destructive. While desire is stronger than judgment, their passion evolves into a different sort of love.

“O’Herlihy (Née Noonan)” by Andrew Peters is an elegiac chronicle that takes us from a woman’s birth to her final years. In it, Peters affirms the value of a life characterized by what might be described as flaws or even failure. Mary, the protagonist of Peters’s sensitive fiction, has moments when she feels herself in “unconscious motion, without volition or directedness . . . moving within an illimitable current, towards an unknowable end.” Yet in important ways her life has a direction un-swerving and complete. She has a son late in life, and, most significantly, she marries the man she wants, who stays by her and loves her despite what happens in her twilight years.

The Jeffrey E. Smith Prize–winning story “Trezzo” by Seth Fried is about two middle-school boys from stressed-out families who develop an unexpected alliance. A coming-of-age story and comic romp of boys pulling outrageous stunts, it’s an exuberant mix of temptation, bad science, bad ideas, and, at its center, the enduring...